The owls are not here no more. - pt. one

April 29th, 2008 by magnus (0) fever talking

Part one : the satin sheet

The room is lit by natural light shining trough two large windows with beatiful and expensive curtains. There is a bed in the room with a sleeping grown woman and an unmade other side of the bed where someone has left a shirt and a pair of used socks in a heap right by the pillow.

act one : Mary Jane wakes up early and remembers that her husband had a late night at the office, and as she turns expecting to see his sleeping slightly beirded face she realizes that she is indeed alone in the bed, but that judging by the clothes she can safely asumme that he is somewhere around the house.

she gets up and finds a note on the door.. She goes into a reading position and a voice fills the room. As if she imagines the sound of him reading the letter.

I should first conclude with the ambivalent manifesto I found in the chest-pocket of my messed up shirt this morning.. It gives me goosebumbs and makes me shiver even thou I must have read it about fifteen times now. It is also my reason for writing this note to you, dear.. Here goes :

In every sentence and for the sake of this haven filled to the brim with heathens, also in between every word, line and scrabbled authours comment in the margins, I see the words of a man hiding in the shadows of the truth occuring to him more and more for every word written and in time, read. Is this what they call a catch22? Is this what they call timetravelling? A broken man, forced on his knees by the chain of events unraveling in images before him just as they unraveled mere hours ago last night before it turned into said morning. I do think this qualifies as morning.. The birds are surely whistling theire songs now, the other animals are probably whispering about what has happended over the night. (Atleast I imagine this, but then I remember that we humans are alone in the category of living as opposed to only surviving. Can we claim that, I wonder after feeling what I have felt this night) I want to learn. but then the owls are not here no more and I have lost contact with the open parts of me again.

dear Arthur - I shall meet us on the stones eh?

this concludes my note to you dear.. I cannot find the piece of soulfire I read that made me write this, but remembering that I dont think you are ready for it and that I still wrote it only for myself I am glad of it.

As you might allready have figured out, I am this man also now. Here in the absolution of sweetness manifestated in our life together I am as puzzled by the fact that these written words are of my own making and I truly wish to find the broken manifesto I must have written to inspire this other side of me to write the quoted note about the third note im writing you dear. Oh god, these words are not me.. They are not from the same planet as I am, nor from any planet I ever imagined. These words.. These proofs that there is a colour even darker than what lurks in the shadows of great ages, still reminds me of many things i sure as hell promised both myself and everyone i knew to pass into nothingness.

I have gone out to seek these truths none the less and you could not have stopped me. I could not have either and this I know because you are the better part of me. Always have been. There is some cold turkey in the fridge and some rice on the stove.. I do not know when I will be back, but I felt the tail of something hitting me in the face sometime during the night, And im going away from here to chase it down. goodbye for now dear..

- Arthur

The woman stands still for a moment and sircles the room once or twice. Seemably in confusion. She then lifts the phone of the hook and calls the police. Officer Charles picks up, and old friend of hers..

Part two will be coming soon

Vote for Merlin to be playlisted on Radio Tango!

April 10th, 2008 by carl (0) r for radio

Hi everybody, great news! We have been picked out as one of five bands in a competition on Radio Tango called “New norwegian music April”. Radio Tango is a really great local rock radio station here in Oslo, and the winner of this competition will be playlisted the whole next month. We really would appreciate if you could spend 20 seconds and follow this link and give us a vote:http://www.radiotango.no/nyhet//ny_norsk_musikk_april_/50512

You can vote at the bottom of the page; “navn” means name and “e-post” means e-mail. Merlin and the song Write Riot Right will also be presented and played each wednesday during April in the 11 AM show called “Kickstart”. Turn on, tune in, drop out.

Recording Vocals on WRR

March 27th, 2008 by martin (0) studio

Here’s a vocal take we ended up using.

Now Broadcasting from Radio Havana

March 27th, 2008 by shah (0) soundlab

I would like to introduce the latest comrade in the Merlin guitar family: The Radio Havana. This pedal is the damaged transistor-radio sound of the Bolshevik pirate broadcast, heard after midnight behind the boxes where the Russians lurk. It’s lo-fi hi-pass in its most imperfect form. It’s also the latest addition to my FX line-up and just the thing I’ve been looking for for years: a filtered and noisy high-passed sound that accentuates really odd frequencies, making it seem like everything is being played through a can. It’s black noise and it’s right up our alley. I would call it quality dissonance; the distortion, although washed out, produces very clear responsive tones, not really a grind fuzz. I haven’t tested it yet, but I bet it would sound great on vocals too. It’s hand-made in the US, where I bought it last week. More specifically, it’s made by Heavy Electronics in Minneapolis, my new favourite pedal manufacturers. I’m slowly buying their entire lineup.

Prepare yourself for an attack from Radio Havana. This should be fun.

The Tripwire Guitar and The Little Box of Wonders

March 13th, 2008 by shah (0) studio

Like previously mentioneded, the guitars on this song were really fun to record. Our main purpose was to make sure that everything had its own presence and distinct sound, so the overdub guitars would have to stand out from the rest in a big way. Instead of opting out for our amazing Tiny-Terror/Orange cab setup, which we would normally use to dub the tracks, I went for a near-clean Britisheque guitar, using my Gibson Les Paul and the Fender SUPER Reverb amp (which we also paired with our Orange setup on the Double Dragon rig) with just a little hint of gain. That guitar was essentially clean though, which was a total breath of fresh air because I am used to playing with nearly full-on distortion on most songs. From there on it was smooth sailing, you can really feel the guitar coming in and there is a real distinction between Martin’s guitar track and mine. Even on the main riff (at the beginning of the song) you can tell the difference, plus mine is panned pretty heavily for extra effect. I didn’t get to use my radio-filter FX (really just a guitar phaser pedal with the settings all fucked up), which is my favourite guitar sound in the whole world, but I’ll keep that in my back pocket for a later time.

Once the guitars were done (in record time), we could focus on filling the song with the perfect atmosphere and I have to say Harry’s Gym was the perfect place for that. Along with having an array of amazingly majestic instruments lying around, including the fantastic August Föster Grand, there was a little box full of wonderful and fun instruments to test out. I tried all of them and one that really stood out for me with regard to this song was the xylophone, it had the perfect spy feel to it. The lurking overtones of the dark street corner. The distant sound of danger and curiosity. So I played a few simple tones that you can hear augmenting the bridge towards the end of the song (where WRITE RIOT RIGHT goes from playing the main theme/riff to 4 notes over a drum solo). I think it added to the feeling we were trying to capture. Actually, over the years we’ve really wanted to introduce these little interesting elements to the songs, and it was really cool to finally have a song that had enough room for it. You’ll hear more of this in our songs in the times to come, especially our new member the Theremin. We also overdubbed the chorus with a Korg MS-10 for the added sound of desperation, and we’ll write more about that shortly.

Agathon - The deadly sounds from the theremin

March 12th, 2008 by martin (0) studio

Martin and Agathon

We are proud to introduce Agathon Clara Babylon, our new friend, the Theremin.

Agathon was smuggled by sea and air from the United States of America by our regular deliveryboy codenamed “Brian from Philadelphia”.

It is something desperate, complainting, hurtful and beautiful about the sound from Agathon - the theremin. Thats why we love it and have made it a regular member of MERLIN.

I think we have introduced Agathon properly in WRITE RIOT RIGHT!

You may hear it in the verses and in the Chorus of this song.

Discovering the Two Amp Rig.

March 12th, 2008 by martin (0) studio

This time around, we looked for guitar sounds that really had their own unique personalities. That’s why we experimented with different rigs and used ideas from our rehearsals to see if they worked in the studio. One time, only Magnus and I were at the rehearsal, and since Carl and Shah weren’t there, I wanted to try to reproduce their presence using multiple amps. So we used the bypass on the tuner, directed the signal through a pitch shifter (shifted way down) and hooked the resulting signal to a 2nd amp. I like to discover. We use this rig on WRITE RIOT RIGHT!

The Double Dragon guitars

March 12th, 2008 by martin (0) studio

Double Dragon Guitar Rig

Recording the guitars was very fun this time. I put up a two amp rig for WRITE RIOT RIGHT to get the right amount of power this song needs.

I recorded with my Mustard yellow Epiphone SG. (”The Molester” as I called it this weekend)

I split the signals into my ORANGE TINY TERROR rig for the rythm sound, and my FENDER AMP PITCHED POWER RIG on the chorus. (Consisting of a pitched down super shifter and a fuzzbox wired to the Fender twin reverb amp)

I split it through my tuner.

I use BOSS Super pitch shifter and Digital delay on W.R.R. (It´s my standard FX setup)

The Orange TIny Terror amp gives a high quality distortion, but I also have a RAT Deuce tone for my additional Overdrive/Distortion needs.

“A punch in the Phase”

On the bridge you may hear a sneaking fast guitar lurking from behind, and that was a special moment in the song, while the lights were dimmed and we had the right Spy-mood in the studio and I just jammed through the song with the Phaser on. This was the result of having the Phaser FX on.

I used a rough distortion while Shah used a rather clean guitar to give the perfect balance in the song. Shah used his dear Gibson for his guitar tracks (Actually, right now you can win an exact copy of this guitar over here at Dagbladet).